 Please welcome to the stage Dr. Milton Chen. Everyone, it's great to see you here. I can't see all of you due to the glare, but I'm very pleased to be part of your convening here at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. There's a little bit of historic preservation there with our cable cars, right? I live here in San Francisco. I want to join in welcoming you to this wonderful city and at an important time in the history of our city, of our state. You know, we're a state known for our environmental leadership and here we are facing some new environmental crises. All that calls for a greater awareness of where we've come from and where we can go. I'm hoping our new governor will also lead that effort as well as a well-known environmentalist. So it's an important time for us, an important time for us to pause and think about what is our heritage? What is our history? How can we preserve it? How can we convey this to the next generation? That's a special interest of mine. I've worked in education for my entire career. I started my career at Sesame Workshop in New York. I've always been interested in use of media and technology to teach young people perhaps in more joyful ways and more interesting ways and more engaging ways than they are used to in just the classroom with textbooks alone. So I'm very pleased to be part of this and much of my work in this area has been done through my work as a member of the National Park Service Advisory Board. That little slide there where it says Chair of the Education Committee should actually say former chair of the Education Committee since some of you may know that we were not convened under the current administration and chose to resign. But the work that we did, especially around engagement of youth with our nation's history, with our nation's most important places, that continues perhaps in a different way. I want to let you know we have a new book coming out about education programs in the National Parks. That should be out next year. I like to say that in this work around teaching and learning that the long-standing achievement gap is really due to an experience gap. That there's a huge gap in the experiences our children have. I'll just point to one example when I was starting out in this work. I was working because I'd started at Sesame Workshop in New York. I worked at KQED here, our PBS station and NPR station here in San Francisco. And in working with teachers around the use of, back then we called it instructional television. Back then you actually had to watch television at the time the program was on. I know this sounds for the millennials in this audience, as you can't imagine. We had to live through that so you could now watch anything you want, whenever you want, on a little device in your pocket or your purse. Teachers told me you won't believe this. We have seniors graduating from the San Francisco High Schools. They live in this city and they've never seen the ocean. They're 18 years old and they've never been to the ocean, which is just a long bus ride or bike ride away. I said, oh, come on, I don't believe that. That's ridiculous. How can that be? You live in the most beautiful city. You live next to the Pacific Ocean. They said, you've been working in your office too long. Come out and meet some of our students. Come to our high schools and talk to these students. And boy, that was a real eye-opener to talk with students who really lived in such a narrow existence and that has only continued, in part, because of the technology that we've given them. They're spending much too much time staring at screens, not enough time getting out, learning about their cities, their communities, their own lives, their ancestors, their families. So that's really fueled a lot of my interest in this work around historic preservation and around preserving cultural and intangible heritage. So we've got to rebalance their experience portfolios. And you won't believe this one either, this Oakland teacher, whose middle school students went to a national park in the Marin Headlands, experienced for the first time camping, experienced being outdoors in this beautiful setting, saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time. And the teacher told me, you won't believe this, but these boys, these are not high school students. These are middle school students. They're 12 and 13-year-old boys. They carry guns, but they're afraid of bugs. Hard to imagine, but again, if you went and talked with them, you could begin to see how this is true. So we need to give students experiences in their communities, experiences with their heritage. And sometimes this is called place-based education. Believe it or not, your part as a preservationist, you are part of a movement to do more place-based learning, place-based education. I was just in Hawaii a while ago, and they said in Hawaii we use the Hawaiian word aina, which means the land. So we want land-based, aina-based education for the Hawaiian students. Here's just one example of how national parks support place-based learning through historic preservation, the Saugus Ironworks in Massachusetts. When you go there, again, you'll immediately, as a young person, even as an adult, begin to understand how our nation came to be, the importance of iron, the importance of steel, how it's made, and the interesting thing about these places, when you're preserving history, and these are places where science and technology, military warfare played a role in all that, these are places where you can see the science and technology more clearly. It was less complex, easier to see, and so the best way I say, if you want to learn how iron's made, go to the site, Saugus Ironworks. I work for Edutopia, which is a website, as you can imagine from the name Edutopia, founded by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a more ideal learning environment. So this is a website created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation here in the Bay Area to showcase these kinds of innovations. And we made a film about these Massachusetts students going to the Saugus Ironworks, and you can see it on our website. We made it more than a decade ago, a fifth grade field trip from a school near Boston. So you begin to see how students immediately engage with being in this place. They begin to understand this is what happened here several centuries ago. You're standing in this particular place. They begin to imagine what it was like, and they talk with park rangers, local historians about what happened there. Just want to point out, since this is one of the better things that we did as an NPS advisory board is to advise the National Parks System on every kid in a park. I think many of you may have heard of this. How many have heard about every kid in a park? Yeah, a fair number of you. This is our program to have every fourth grader receive a pass for themselves and their families to go into the National Parks for a year. This program continues. It's in its third or fourth year now. It's so popular. It's been hard to eliminate it. Every kid in a park continues. Please let all your fourth graders know. When this program was announced, in fact, we were having discussions with the White House Domestic Policy Council and others, and we said, well, we want to get more kids into the National Parks. We want to get all kids in the National Parks to experience this kind of place-based learning, and they counseled us, if you're going to do a campaign like this for the National Parks, you need to pick a focus. You need to pick a grade level. We said, oh, that's going to be hard to do. What about eighth grade? What about high school students? What about fourth graders? You may know of the fourth grade reading challenge that we're still having many third graders who cannot get to fourth grade reading level. So we said, well, it's important to get excited about learning. We'll pick the fourth grade. Let me up on this fourth year. When this was announced, we got some very irate letters from fifth graders. You can't imagine how they felt about, I just graduated from fourth grade. What am I going to do now? The nps.gov website is full of lesson plans. If you're getting involved with schools, we're visiting some of your historic sites, it's full of lesson plans, and the National Parks Service has become a real ally in this educational movement to make learning more authentic, more realistic, so nps.gov slash teachers. One of the things we did at Edutopia was to make a short film about historic preservation of intangible heritage of the Choctaw Indians in Mississippi. Feeling it was very important for the next generation to learn the language, the music, the culture, the arts, the history. So this is an intergenerational project where elders in the Choctaw community take it upon themselves to teach these lessons to their young people. This was a project that not only connected elders with students in Mississippi, but also through the internet, early days of the internet, and you can see that this film was made more than 15 years ago, with indigenous children with other indigenous kids around the world, in Australia and New Zealand, for instance, in Thailand. This was a project called the First Peoples Project, so I'd like to show you this short film. The Choctaw Indians of Mississippi have celebrated their culture in games and dances. Now the youngest generation is learning about their tribes' culture and sharing their discoveries with a global audience through the International Education and Resource Network's First Peoples Project. Indigenous people from five continents participate in this cultural exchange. Students conduct research into their own unique heritage. They then write stories, draw pictures, and take photographs. The artwork is displayed on the First Peoples Project website, and it's also exchanged by mail each year with other project schools. And I reckon the colors are really done. We display the artwork and different teachers and schools may develop their own curriculum activities because we have this treasure that's coming in once a year. They live in houses like these. They don't have very much possession and they sleep on that and don't have a lot of furniture and they have like small tables. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians which operates the largest and one of the most tech-savvy reservation school systems in the country has participated in the First Peoples Project since 1995. Let's see that one. This year, the First Peoples Project theme is pastimes and for the Choctaw that means stickball. America's first field sport it was called the Little Brother of War and traditionally played to settle disputes among rival factions. The rules are simple in this rough-and-tumble game. Carry or throw the ball downfield using your sticks then bounce it off the other team's goalpost. You gotta be strong, body, mind and use the script. You gotta be all tough and if not, you're gonna get hurt once you start playing. In addition to the art exchange, the First Peoples Project has a humanitarian aid component an effort that began several years ago when Choctaw students were watching a videotape that showed the stark conditions of a project school in Thailand. You can see all what we call the holes of the wind conceiving. It is very cold in the night and the teacher said one of the things that they need a lot is blankets to help keep the cold away. Some students that were watching the film at times said, oh, we got plenty of blankets. Can we just send them some blankets? At the same time, the kids in Zuni, New Mexico were seeing the film and they just happened to say basically the same thing. Well, you know, we make blankets, we have blankets. Can we send them some blankets? So the students launched a humanitarian effort that is still going strong today. We made Christmas cards for Thailand to raise money and we gave them a generator. That's great. What did you think about that? I thought it was kind of nice. So far, the tribe has raised money to buy blankets, flooring and a generator and fund a teacher's aid position and several student scholarships for the Thailand school. Look this way. While the humanitarian efforts and the art exchanges connect students to their peers around the globe, the process of researching their own culture has given these students an even greater reward, a chance to connect with their elders. What's your favorite talk about that? Snake dance because you maneuver to the right, to the left and you just wiggle around. That's where life is. Life is not always straight, straight road and that's what the snake dance reminds me of. The importance of this project has been it prongs us to research and get the kids working in areas that are significant here at home, communicating more with their elders. I was with John Levi Bell. Have you ever heard of John Levi Bell? Research and culture, learning how to research through the internet and coming up with the information, going through the process, the learning process. I don't want kids to forget about traditional dancing or traditional cooking or speaking their own language and maybe I can influence or somebody else can influence these kids that we need to keep our tradition and our culture alive. Even if you just can say a few words in Chalk Talk, that's okay. Anything you want to learn, you can learn. We're all supposed to learn from each other as we go along. I can learn from you. I'm learning something from you, but the humanitarian, I didn't know that. I learned something from you. I hope you learn something from me. For more information on what works in public education, go to edutopia.org. Thank you and credit to our filmmaker Ken Ellis. I hope you notice that they said there was a stickball was their way of settling tribal disputes if there was a impending war coming that they played stickball. So there's a lot of wisdom in the Chalk Talk tribe. Wouldn't it be great if we settled some of our warfare through playing of sports? Here's another story we covered of a student who won a scholarship to study the Navajo language and because she did not have teachers of the Navajo language in her school, she was able to study this language through an online class. So technology can also be a way of connecting our students and our adults with other languages, cultures. It's a great story and we like to think, as you saw with the humanitarian effort of that project, that through the internet people can connect and hopefully create a more peaceful world. I just want to note, I think most of you are familiar with this now that the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Theme Study is now out. It's been online for a while and has been published. So yeah, I'm glad we were able to publish this and did receive approval, so please check that out as well. I'll close with this quote from Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill said a lot of really good things in a great way with language and this is what he said, that first people build buildings and then buildings build people. The places where we spend our time, historic places, communities, these help shape us as people. And I can't think of anything more important at this point in our democracy for us to make a renewed effort to teach our children who they truly are, as the Choctaw were doing, where they come from, where they're living, the sacred places, the Aina where they live. So I look forward to exploring these themes further and I know our panelists have a lot of experience with this, so thank you very much. Please welcome to the stage our Trust Live Responders, Jenna Dublin, Josephine Talamantes, and our moderator, Timothy Fry. Good morning, everyone. Well, first of all, I want to thank everybody for joining us this morning in the audience, but also those joining us either from their home, school, or work on the live stream. Milton, thank you so much for such an insightful presentation, especially how technology has transformed how we learn and also how intangible cultural heritage can resonate with young people today. I think it was really insightful. And I know our panelists here have also had experience connecting with young people, so it's a way to introduce themselves. I was hoping, Josephine and Jenna, you could start by talking a little bit about your work and your projects. Sure, absolutely. So one of the things that I've been really privileged to work on for the past couple months is part of the African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund for the Trust, and as part of the Action Fund within the Research and Policy Lab, which does a lot of statistics work, we really wanted the opportunity to bring more emerging scholars into the work and have them as young people who know their cities, who know their communities, and are bringing the knowledge and their personal connections between a sense of place, between heritage and also social justice for a lot of vulnerable communities. So there's 10 fellows who have been at the conference, who are emerging scholars, and have been doing the work of making the important connections or more so finding out from communities their own knowledge and their own sense of what are relationships between historic preservation, intangible heritage culture, and important social justice issues like neighborhood change in our cities. That's fantastic. Well, I've been working on in the last couple of months, actually last couple of years, the establishment of Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center. And it is located now. We just received a 20-year lease on the building in Chicano Park, which is a 7.4-acre park with close to 100 murals on the pillars and pylons and abutments of the Coronado Bay Bridge in San Diego, California. The museum will focus on art because the murals are an outdoor museum, and we will do rotating exhibition. History collecting, we are currently collecting oral histories of the communities, of the residents of the community in Barrio Logan and Logan Heights, and science because the proximity to the bay is less than five blocks, and we're looking at working with the children on climate action issues and environmental justice issues. What is interesting is in the last couple of months, through our website, we've been able to attract a lot more youth to our programs. Our board members are, some of them are educators in the local junior high school, and some members, my vice chair is a professor at the University of San Diego, so we've been able to partner and do programming that is for the community. We recently, since we don't have a building, we're virtual right now, and we will soon have a mobile classroom in partnership with the University of San Diego. One of our programs recently, I think is probably one of the best examples, is we partnered with the Logan Heights Library, the Chicano Park Steering Committee who are the stewards of the park, the museum, another organization via Internacional to put on a lowrider conversation. And we brought in these, and the Lowrider Council was also a partner, I say that because there's a number of different lowrider clubs and the council was able to work with lowriders in both the San Diego and Tijuana area. So we brought in the elders who started lowriding, we dated back to late 40s, early 50s, when the movement started. Then we brought them and we brought cars out to the library and we brought the elders to talk about what it takes to create these beautiful works of art and the ingenuity to work the hydraulics to bump and low and go on the side. And what was really interesting of these elders is many of them brought their next generation with them. So we had lowrider bikes and this wonderful demonstration. And it's another form of validating a practice that was ostracized in our community many years back. I mean many communities, even in Sacramento, have outlawed lowriding. And in San Diego and National City, which is a little city right next door, also outlawed lowriding. And so we were able to bring back these elders to talk about what they had to do to create these beautiful works of art and how the hydraulics work and the youth that are involved were very excited. So we then correlated with some science teachers that are working in different institutions to go into the schools with one of our board members, the Junior High, and do some science projects. And of course we collect oral history, so we have produced a book and a video on lowriding in San Diego and Tijuana and a video production that has shown on PBS. So that's just one example of the things that we're doing, focusing on the next generation. As the steering committee, we toured the park, which is a national landmark as of 2016. And we do educational tours and we're now working, and we have been working with the youth so that they can do the tours because we want to kind of step back and let them go. That's interesting. And that actually flows into my next question, which is, you know, preservation has long been a field rooted in the value of the expert, professional expert opinion. And I was encouraged over the last few days at the conference of hearing that notion being questioned. And I'm wondering, you know, Milton, I've seen in your presentation with the First Peoples Project or Jenna working with the fellows, Josephine, and having students lead the tours, what other ways, or if you could talk a little bit more about how you can encourage communities to take ownership over their own narratives. Sure. Yeah, what I would say, starting off, is I think that a lot of communities have a lot of deeply embedded expertise. And they have the language. They could describe what's happened to their community and how they build their community. But I think a lot of times there's the issue of changing, you know, stories into kind of technical language that, you know, people can begin to engage with city council, engage with land use issues because to me, I think a lot of, for a lot of communities of color in particular that, you know, intangible heritage, the sense of self, the sense of your everyday life and your past is so intertwined within the politics of your everyday life, you know, where you live, you know, where you aspire to be. So I think for myself, I always kind of put my urban planner, you know, hat on and kind of really interested in, you know, developing the ways that you can really honor local expertise, you know, as a form of knowledge and bring it into, like, you know, criticism, bring it into broader conversations about particularly what's happening in cities. So I think for myself, I do kind of hold on a bit to the planner as an expert but kind of some ways as a facilitator in terms of helping people to organize themselves because the knowledge is there, the expertise is there. The museum, like I said, is not just a museum but also a cultural center and it'll house a library and archive and the Tommy Camarillo Archive is about 48 years' worth of information on Chicano Park, which is now being facilitated by her in particular but also all of her grandchildren maintain the archive. So once we get our facility, it'll also be in there. But I will say with regard to the youth, earlier this year the park was attacked by the alt-right because they didn't like the name Chicano and they didn't like some of the images that our artists have displayed on the walls. It's public art and it's kind of locked in from the 70s so we're not going to change anything for anybody. So when they were coming to really attack, the community came out in support but the youth came out. We had youth speakers. We had, in addition to religious leaders and the kumiai doing blessings, we also had the young brown berets. We had the San Diego Black Panthers which are the youth Black Panthers. So the youth were coming out in defense of the park and we decided to do an educational tour rather than to respond to any kind of negativity. We based, the tour was based in love and expression and it was so wonderful because the youth were very much integrated. The young dancers, Aztec dancers, came and led ceremony. When the kumiai came, they came with a group which was very inclusive of youth. So we're really focusing on that next generation Chicano park and the founders and we're all getting older now and we really need the youth to be there and that's really our focus with the archive, the library and the cultural center will focus on things such as events and activities, educational things but we're also focusing on alternative healing modalities because many of our communities don't use western medicine so we're looking at traditional healers. Herbalogy, we have an herb garden in the park so we're already working towards educating on healing herbs and again, climate control because we're right there and bodyologin was displaced from 20,000 residents down to less than five in 14 years. When the interstate five went in, it split the community and then the corn auto bay bridge then dissected it again. So many of the youth that are still there understand that we're on these three different sides but yet we're one community so we're looking at ways of bridging all of that and on top of that, unfortunately the city kind of named us differently. It was all Logan Heights and then this section on the west side became bodyologin. The other side of the freeway was Logan Heights and then further down was Southeast San Diego so we're really working and we've gotten youth to be part of the planning committees because we figured what that planning is doing is not cohesive to our community so we're working on... we just have a lot of different strategies going on to make sure that the youth are engaged with us and understand preservation and it may not be in the terms that historic preservation or planners or architects or designers use but they understand what is their cultural intangible heritage. If I said that word they'd probably go what are you talking about? We've also seen young people attribute their expertise in media making. One of the examples on the Egitopia website is young students in Chicago making a film about a historic African-American neighborhood in Chicago on the south side called Bronzeville so helping to tell the stories through media in a small town in Oregon I think as a grants pass students create a little museum in a historic schoolhouse about the history of their town taking photographs, making media so young people can have expertise that they can contribute as well. One of the really powerful things that I just picked up from what you were saying is that how intangible heritage it really transcends borders and boundaries and I think it really is a way to really honor or really recognize the ways that we all occupy multiple social positions and if there's boundaries that are geographic or infrastructure or human made I think that galvanizing or young people just coming together and recognizing that those physical borders they don't exist. I'd like to pick up on a few comments that you all made and maybe going back to Jenna's pragmatic approach also as a planner I think there are still members of the preservation community that want to be helpful that are listening but are still sort of struggling with where they fit into this dialogue or this discussion about intangible heritage and I'm wondering from any of you what advice would you give them these professional preservationists on how they can help support promoting intangible heritage in local communities. I'll just say language is critical because the terminology that is used in the professional field is not always easily translated so there has to be a way to bridge there. I think the professionals in the different fields need to be able to listen and ask because sometimes people come in and they're going to do this or they're going to do that in the community. Let me just give you an example. It took me 14 years to convince members of the Chicano Park Steering Committee and of which I'm a member that is intergenerational to agree with me to go forward to put Chicano Park and the monumental murals on the national register. 14 years. Didn't trust government, didn't trust planners, preservationists or anybody until finally and I did a lot of research on the register to try didn't find much that related maybe Tiedadito in Tucson but still not interested because this lack of trust they've been burned we've been burned and ostracized I mean it wasn't until I was doing the research that I realized that our community was a segregated community. It wasn't blatant it was through residential covenants and I didn't understand I just thought we all live there so I think language that is understandable asking respectfully respecting the community's perspective and listening if they don't want it then you have to try to understand why or find ways to let them experience how it could be beneficial. I think through Intangible Heritage I think for me it comes down so much to language like you were mentioning and one of the presentations that one of the 10 research fellows gave yesterday was about the power of language in shaping the future of neighborhoods in terms of imagining what it was and also what it could be and I think I really see an opportunity for preservationists and professionals to be a part of the real work that has to be done in terms of shaping the future of neighborhoods so that it's very inclusive so that residents who have been there for a long time can stay there and being part of that it is a discourse it is a conversation that goes on through media goes on through newspapers goes on within the things that people say about a neighborhood that can often stigmatize it so I think Intangible Heritage and preservationists really do have a role in shaping the stories of places in a way that envisions them as being more inclusive and equitable Milton I love the film and I would like to work with our and we are kind of working with some young filmmakers in the area to document and that's the focus for the 50th anniversary is to document the next generation working with a young man right now who was teaching at the junior high school but he's documenting the youth particularly the next administrators the next artists that are working with some of the master muralists he's documenting the performing artists ballet, folklorico, azteca performing artists, musicians Ramon Chucky Sanchez was a national heritage award winner and his children and the ones that studied under him so we're documenting all of that so by the 50th we can do a presentation that demonstrates the transition but I would love somehow to you know really get it on PBS maybe work with your foundation and others that are connected so that the word gets out on how to transition and how to move on we really need to just get out of the way of the next generation and I did hear somebody say that on one of the panels recently and I agree move us back so that we can then maybe advise or help or even just go retire somewhere alright alright well we're close to wrapping up but I do have one more question Jenna your session yesterday and the fellows presenting their projects was a really moving experience I think for a lot of people in the room and really drove home how disinvestment and displacement can sort of tear apart intangible heritage and have a profound effect on it so from all the panelists what makes you hopeful or optimistic about the power of intangible heritage in moving forward oh gosh I mean I feel like so many a lot of things you know what I know is cities what I know is about people who live in cities and I think that one of the things that I would say again from the fellows who did such amazing work just thinking about the work that like T.K. Smith did in St. Louis or Shade in Louisville or Nichelle did in Chicago is that people really recognize that like yeah they're past it's been kind of torn apart and there is a lot of politics for communities of color that the physical remnants of you know their lifetime or their parent's lifetime their grandparents it's just not there on the physical landscape anymore so to me I'm really hopeful in terms of the ways that you know a lot of the practitioners from a lot of different fields are recognizing that and recognizing the ways that elevating that heritage is a way to begin a conversation about more institutional responsibility in terms of what has happened in the past to neighborhoods in terms of different policies and practices and you know how could work together for the future of neighborhoods I'll add that another organization that I've had the privilege to be part of is the Latinos in Heritage Conservation and it's a nationwide network and many members are here at this conference but one of the things we're doing many things in different communities but one of the things that I was really pleased with when we started organizing that we focused on an educational component because we want to make sure that our communities understand preservation conservation and how to continue to promote the goodwill and the positive cultural attributions that our communities have throughout the nation and especially right now with the children being taken away from their parents on the border and this effort of looking at all Latinos not knowing our history is here we've documented our history and in many cases in the southwest like they say we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us and so it's a fact and so with this effort there's a nationwide movement to really validate our communities nationwide. Well I'm encouraged by the interest and the excitement of young people in learning more about their own cultures and histories. Unfortunately it's not well taught in schools and often the most valuable lessons students are learning come from outside of the school setting or maybe through partnership between teachers and historians preservationists we don't have teachers and schools of education that are embracing this kind of preservation and history and telling all the stories in the community so the schools and universities need help with that and I am encouraged that it can actually teach students more about themselves and what's more interesting than learning about yourself but often they're asked to learn in class about things that don't seem to connect with their own lives so this makes learning very relevant and kids get very excited about it. That's great. Well we're almost out of time so I wanted to thank Milton, Jenna, Josephine thank you so much for taking part in this conversation and sharing your insights and we're hoping you will continue the conversation in the learning labs listed above so thank you again for attending and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.